Because he was trying to hold the nation together, and using slavery as a weapon against the South. And the states that typically had less slaves were less likely to initially secede…
And slavery is absolutely unconstitutional, and only hypocritical supreme court “judges” using the most spurious semantic dodges in history could actually read the Constitution and agree…
There were slaves in other States at that time. I do not defend slavery. Slavery was slowly going out, even in the South. Slavery was way down on the list of reasons for the war. My own great-grandfather was a slave holder, and he emancipated his own slaves before he joined the Confederate Army.
Preserving the institution of slavery had everything to do with the War. It was the Constitutional crises of territories becoming either free states vs. slave states that created the antipathy leading to the War. You cannot really defend the Confederacy without acknowledging that slavery was integral to its very existence. I’ll grant you that there is a “libertarian” movement that seeks to “reform” the Confederacy into some sort of anti-federal lobby for states rights. But this is pretty disingenuous at best as many in the Confederacy were not seeking democracy at all, but ascendancy politically over the North…
Why free something, and then go fight for keeping it.
Perhaps because he was a Southerner, and knew that the Union forces would come sooner or later? And he could lose property, etc.
Perhaps he knew also that even if the South “won” the Civil War/War Between the States, that there would have been almost an inevitable negotiated settlement and a reestablishment of a Union or some sort…
I know the mantra that the lower classes were fooled into fighting for the aristocracy, but it just propaganda perpetrated on children in the public schools. I know, because I have taught U.S. History in public school. You admit that the war was economic. You’re correct there. The South, being lower in population, was at a disadvantage in representation in the U.S. Congress. The industrial North, with greater population and representation, was getting legislation more favorable to the industrial North than the agricultural South. That was a much more important reason for the split than slavery ever was. I’ll take a break, but I will be available tomorrow, the Lord willing, to defend the Southern Confederacy. “Deo Vindice”
The War was very much economic, we agree. But I surmise there would have been no real split without slavery, as there was no other issue really on the table.
Workers in the industrial North, even if they were racists who may have hated blacks as much as any Southerner, may have resented the fact that slaves could be had and could potentially be used to suppress their wages. And one could also argue that the institution of slavery itself hindered economic and industrial development in the South, and that slavery was not just immoral, but retrograde and oppressive not just to the slaves themselves. The reason why the South was lagging was because the elites had no vested interest in changing in their shortsightedness, and were struggling to maintain what was little more than a romantic, feudal society.
One must also acknowledge one of the key reasons the South lost was not just because of being outnumbered and against a superior industrial base, but their very ideology of a decentralized state prevented the Confederates from sustaining a long term defense in a war of attrition…
